Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg 224pp, Norton, £14.99 American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Phillips 462pp, Viking, £15.99 Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America by Randall Balmer. 256pp, Basic Books, £14.99God Won't Save America: Psychosis of a Nation by George Walden 304pp, Gibson Square, £16.99A Jew Among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed by Mark Pinsky 155pp, Westminster John Knox Press, £9.99

The story is told in Washington that, as the polls closed on the night of the 2004 presidential election, exhilarated campaign aides approached the Democrat candidate, John Kerry, with good news. They had squeezed every last vote and were on course for a famous victory. But then, as the night wore on, a different story emerged: unanticipated votes were piling up, and states that had seemed won were swinging to the Republicans. Christian evangelicals had turned out in force to return God's candidate to the White House. To coin a phrase, it was the religious right wot won it.

Ever since that night, hosts of books have jostled for space in American bookshops to try to explain the phenomenon. I shouldn't complain. I am writing one myself, and even as I do so, every week a new volume seems to emerge from across the Atlantic, bearing a characteristic three decker subheading under the title to describe what it is all about. At the last count there were at least 30 in publication.

The story they tell, about a society so similar to ours except in its religiosity, is a depressing one of low politics, of deceit and deception, manipulation and outright lies to mobilise a constituency for highly partisan and sometimes very secular motives. The credulous inhabitants of the suburbs of white America, their social lives wrapped up in their churches, getting their news from Fox, insulated from the world outside, are being told that their country and its values are under attack, not just from external terrorism and "Islamofascism", but from the insidious and somehow almighty forces of subversive, Godless liberalism at home.

When President George Bush speaks of resurrection and struggling for civilisation, his constituency knows precisely what he means and where he's coming from. When he told Texas pastors in 1999 that God had told him to run for the presidency, they did not turn a hair at his conceit (or at God's judgment).

Born-again Christians form slightly less than a quarter of the electorate, but nearly 80% of them voted for Bush in 2004. His performance was the worst of any would-be second-term incumbent since another moralist, Woodrow Wilson, in 1916, yet Bush still captured rising proportions of voters from all faith groups, black and white, Catholic and Protestant - all except Muslims. The religious vote made the difference. For them it was not the economy, stupid, but morality and personal salvation that were at issue.

As a calculated result of its shameless wooing, the administration of the richest, most powerful and advanced nation on earth has found itself a willing prey to lobbyists for some of the most obscurantist, intolerant and sectarian, not to say hair-raising, Christian religious beliefs on the planet.

This crop of books captures various aspects of the insurgency. Michelle Goldberg, a young journalist for Salon magazine, went among some of the fundamentalists to interview them. In Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, she has produced some excellent firsthand reporting of their essential weirdness, even as she overcame their aversion to her Jewishness.

By contrast, Kevin Phillips - a former Republican strategist - provides, in American Theocracy, a cool analysis to show the sheer recklessness of the movement, chillingly quoting former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill: "Ideology is a lot easier because you don't have to know or search for anything. You already know the answer to everything. It's not penetrable by facts."

Possibly the most agonised recent publication is Randall Balmer's Thy Kingdom Come - agonising because the author, professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University, is himself an evangelical. He can't stand what the right is doing to a creed that is not inherently partisan or simplistic. His book is a howl from the heart: "I went to Sunday school nearly every week of my childhood ... but I must have been absent the day they told us that the followers of Jesus were obliged to secure even greater economic advantages for the affluent, to deny those Jesus called 'the least of these' a living wage and to despoil the environment by sacrificing it on the altar of free enterprise. I missed the lesson telling me that I should turn a blind eye to the suffering of others." His analysis of the deceit and hypocrisy at the heart of the religious right is devastating.

More coolly, from this side of the Atlantic, the former Tory MP George Walden has written a scrappily produced and supercilious volume, God Won't Save America, blaming it all on the Puritans who crossed the ocean to establish a theocracy of the elect 400 years ago. He has a point, but this is a perfunctory, under-researched effort, sometimes wrong in its facts and with at least one page of footnotes missing.

More charitably, Mark Pinsky, religious writer on the Orlando Sentinel, Jewish and a leftie, has produced an entertaining book, A Jew Among the Evangelicals, on why he quite likes the evangelicals he dwells among in central Florida. These include the irrepressible Marvin Rosenthal, born Jewish, now born-again Christian, who founded the Holy Land Experience, a theme park aimed at converting other Jews en route to Disney World. It offers special-effect fiery pillars, the authentic desert worship experience and the Oasis cafe with Goliath burgers and a menu posted on a torah scroll. "Our purpose was to spread the word of God," he told Pinsky. "But of course we needed to make it pay."

· Stephen Bates's Right With God: Religion and Politics in America is published next year by Hodder